Guercino

Watermark: none.
Although Guercino began making drawings of beggars and tradesmen early in his career, surely in emulation of the Carracci, he long continued the practice. The Bird-catcher has generally been considered a work of Guercino's pre-Roman period, but the precision and variety of the pen lines, a more sophisticated use of the artist's "gravure style", point to a date in the later 1620s or even perhaps into the 1630s. A close look at the man's visage best reveals the variety of hatching and stippling used in the drawing. The drawing also exemplifies a sophisticated stylistic trick first noted by Turner and Plazzotta: Guercino, after fully loading his pen with ink, tended to draw in the areas that would be in darkest shadow--here, below the man's britches and in the hollows of his elbows--so that those areas have not only more hatching, but also thicker, darker pen strokes. A drier pen (with a thinner line) would be used for longer parallel strokes of hatching, such as in the bird-catcher's lower legs. As noted earlier, Guercino was said to have a particular sympathy for the lower classes, and indeed, there is a distinct humanity to the bird-catcher's face. Whether this is simply meant to be a forthright depiction of a tradesman, however, remains an open question. Bird-catchers figure with some regularity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian art, with the Bird-catcher with an owl in the Carracci-Guillain "Arti di Bologna" engravings a notable example probably known to Guercino. Bird-catchers also figure among catalogues of hunting and other rural pastimes, as in Stradanus's drawings and prints. Yet, bird-catching can also be associated with seduction or courtship--albeit more commonly in eighteenth-century paintings like François Boucher's Bird-catchers (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles)-- and uccello (bird) is Italian slang for "penis," which cannot be overlooked given the position in which Guercino's figure holds the cage. Part of the drawing's charm is the ambiguity as to whether any of these secondary readings are intended. -- Catalog entry: Guercino : virtuoso draftsman, Morgan Library & Museum, 2019, p. 46.